Always Happy To Bleed
by LetGoLetOpenDoorsOfPurgatory
Summary: "Always happy to bleed for the Winchesters." He once said.


**Always Happy To Bleed**

It started with a simple fracture. One in his foot, to be exact. The pain for him had been pretty intense. He had to keep his foot wrapped and remain on the medications for a few months as he toughed the pain in order to keep money coming in so that he could afford food, self-care, and the medications. Eventually he was able to get rid of the wrap, but not the pills.

It escalated a bit as his time away from Dean and Sam continued. It went from pain pills to whatever that syrup he had taken for his bad cough had been called. NyQuil, he thinks. It put him to sleep pretty fast. It didn't make him deal with the obnoxious practice of counting sheep that weren't there or tossing and turning in his bed until he wound up roaming again.

Time continued to pass. Job to job, bed to bed, place to place. It all seemed so…_meaningless._ Until his interests fell on a raven-haired woman he had worked with for awhile. Those interests had eventually led to him experiencing sex again.

And, well, again.

With each new temporary came a whole new round of interests. He missed the Winchesters, he did, but if he wasn't safe to have around he'd make do. Anything for the Winchester brothers. He cared for both Dean and Sam and he'd do anything for them. Even if it meant struggling to make ends meet as a human being. Somehow he was beginning to understand humans in a way he had never understood before – and somehow, it also really hurt him to understand them on this level.

A year passed. A full year since he had last seen the Winchesters. Well, he had seen them on a few hunts – but somehow it hadn't counted to him. It was just business. It wasn't_ family time_ like it used to be. Even the smallest of actions that didn't involve a hunt had been that to him. He was unsure if they felt the same, but what it had meant to him is what mattered.

Now, he was lucky if he didn't have something in his system. Be it narcotics or just cough syrup, there was always something in the veins of the human being. Always. It allowed him to feel little to nothing and it was a gratifying feeling. It felt good to get away from the mind numbing pain that always tried to consume him. The guilt, the anger, the fear – all of it just washed away.

The time he spent with women was always splendid. Fun in its own form. But if there was something about him, despite his acquired taste of the human anatomy, he always did his best to respect said women. He was loving, careful, and always mindful. Somehow it seemed to make it better for him. As if he wasn't just living through the motions like he was.

The next time he did see the Winchesters he was surprised to see it was just Dean.

Something was _shattered_ within the eldest Winchester. It hurt him to see Dean this way. He hadn't seen Dean so absolutely consumed by grief. And he definitely hadn't remembered Dean smelling like a bar. He knew Dean had always drank alcohol and Sam had been involved in the practice as well but Dean had never smelled this bad.

"What is wrong?" He held himself steady on the nearby wall as the slightly taller male entered.

"He's gone." There wasn't a question to be asked here. Dean's voice cracked and Sam was missing. Who else could the Winchester be speaking of?

"But certainly there was something you could have done –"

"No. He's gone. He was right."

There was a pause.

"Who was right?"

"Lucifer."

He later found himself at a camp with Dean. He had tried to sober up the best he could but it had become pretty useless. Especially when he realized he was having trouble functioning not too long into his detox. Dean had to have noticed, he knew it, but nothing was said. Not a single word.

He continued to fall. In ways he didn't imagine he could fall – but never once did he let that cloud his judgment in protecting Dean. If he could not have saved Sam, then he was determined to save the man he had dragged out of Hell, damaged soul and all. He hadn't regretted his choices. All of them, every last one of them, had always been for Dean. And when he and Sam had acquired a better relationship they had become for Sam. Every little movement, every decision, every threat – it was for both of them. His family. The _only_ family he recognized.

And even as the male lay cold and dying on the floor of an old abandoned warehouse now full of dead Croats there hadn't been a move he had regretted. He might have felt Dean had told him to leave because of how useless he was as a human, but that didn't make him regret his choices for them. He might have felt guilt, he might have even felt suppressed anger, and he might've felt extreme self-hatred but nothing, not even this, could make him regret all the choices he made for the Righteous Man.

Absolutely _nothing_ could make Castiel, angel of the Lord, regret his decisions for him. Because they were all out of love. Dean had shown him things that no one else had(so had Sam) and for that he would always be thankful. He had shown him that things didn't always have to go by the book – even if eventually they did. He had shown him that the road less traveled was better than the beaten path. Sometimes the high road wasn't the way out. Sometimes it was. Sometimes you had to lie to get what you wanted. Sometimes you didn't. For all of that Castiel was thankful. Every bit of it, and he'd never change the course of things for anything in the world. He'd change this part of it, but everything else? He was perfectly content and at peace with. Sure, things hadn't always run smoothly, but he still could live in peace with it. He could die in peace with it, actually.

And that's why, even if the pain was blinding, Cas couldn't help but to wear a weak smile as his eyes closed and utter a small, choked, "_Thank you_."


End file.
